Some things are hard to say

Jason has been giving me a hard time about not posting lately, but I've been having a hard time, which makes it really difficult to talk about on a public forum like this. At the beginning of June, I got a phone call that I've been fearing: my grandma was in the hospital and they were going to have to put her on a respirator. I dropped everything that weekend and drove out to see her and to be with my family during the crisis. I had my moment alone in the hospital room with her to say goodbye and tell her how much I love her, but we all knew that she was ready to go so we all had to be strong for her. I came home the next day knowing that I'd had my chance to say goodbye and really needing the strength of my husband to get me through. My grandma passed away on our 12 year anniversary, and really since I got home from my trip, I've had a hard time. I know that I will be with her again, but I think it's just hard for us to say goodbye for now. As selfish as it is, I really miss her and wanted her to stay on the earth for awhile longer. I think we always think that we have more time, so there were times when I didn't go visit for one reason or another, and now all I have are regrets that I didn't take the time to see her more often. It was very cathartic for me, however to be able to create a collage that we will display at her memorial this weekend. I will share it once we get home, but I would like my family to be able to see it for the first time there and hopefully it will make them happy and sad like it did me when I was creating it. And I was really happy to be able to put my growing photoshop skills to work in a way that made me really happy (like restoring a photo that had been cracked). I'm grateful for the knowledge that I have of the future, that I will see my grandma again and that she was greeted by all her family when she got to the other side. And most of all, I'm grateful that I had this amazing woman in my life who loved me as I loved her, the way only a grandma can. And as she always said to us when expressing her love, I love her 2 pieces.

Photography final

My inspiration for my photography final this semester came from a couple different places. Throughout the semester, each of us had to give a presentation on a different artist. The artist that I was assigned, Nan Goldin (just a warning, if you google her to see her images, some of them are explicit), takes a lot of self portraits. And while I don't really like her style of photography or her subject matter for the most part, I admired her courage in taking photographs of herself. So towards the end of the semester I started wondering if I had the courage to do the same thing. Then, right before we got our assignment, Jason starting giving me a hard time about my "difficult" life and how I basically just sit in the loft all day and play games on my computer or scrapbook while occasionally working on my photography. So when our professor gave us the assignment, he talked about how a montage can be an elongated narrative, and I immediately thought about taking photos of myself in the loft doing all the things that I do. Well, logistically that didn't work out because my loft is just small enough, or the areas that I sit are small enough, that I would have been sitting in front of myself so I would have been blocking myself in the photo. Instead, I started thinking about a photograph that a friend of mine did in our class at the end of the semester of her laundry and it got me thinking about all the things that I actually do around the house that my husband doesn't always see me do. I decided to focus on the kitchen because it is the room in the house that I spend most of my time either with, or doing things for, my family.

I'm blessed to have a big, beautiful kitchen that gets incredible light during the day so one day I decided to just see what would happen if I tried. Jason was working from home that day so he got to laugh at me getting all giddy when my test shots looked like they were actually going to work--I know, I get really silly when I find a way to produce the art that I see in my head. So this was my end result (if you click the image, you can get a larger view):

When assembling a piece like this, the point isn't to get it to line up perfectly, by creating repeating patterns (in areas like the cupboards and the chairs) it adds to the sense that time has passed, so when you're telling a story like mine, that is a good thing. Another deliberate choice that I made was that while my upper half was never broken up, my bottom half was. In this choice, I was trying to show the movement that I make as I go all over the kitchen working during the day, but keeping up my upper half intact shows the strength I have as a mom to get my chores done and take care of my family. 

When I think back about the short amount of time that has passed, ten months since I first set foot in a photography class, I am incredibly amazed at what I have accomplished in such a short amount of time. Next semester I'm going to be challenging myself in a whole different way as I take my first film class, so I'm excited to continue to grow as a photographer, and I look forward to the challenge.

Always learning

I had the opportunity to do my first paid shoot last month, and I was very excited for the end result, especially since it's a newborn and I'm anxious to please her parents. I was all done with the editing and burned a cd to give to the parents when I came across some fun new editing techniques in photoshop that I just had to try out. Well, needless to say, I had to re-edit all the photos before I give them up to the parents. My plan had already been to post them here in a couple days, but my husband started giving me a hard time about the fact that it's been a couple weeks since I've posted. I hesitate to post because all that I have to post about is photography, but it really feels like that's all I do, so I guess that's going to continue for the next couple of months until I finish this photography class.




 

Back when I was having babies, it wasn't the trend to do these beautiful photos of your new baby, but I really wish it had been. This is a phase that lasts such a short period of time that I absolutely love to be able to document it for the parents in such a beautiful way. I certainly hope this mommy and daddy love the photos of their baby girl as much as I enjoyed taking them.

Controlling Color

 Every time we take a photograph, we think about color. More precisely, our subconscious tells us how we feel about the photograph based on the colors in it. In order to become a better photographer, we then have to learn what the colors mean and then learn how to control the color in a photograph in order to get the feeling we desire from that photograph. So our assignment for color was to take 20 photographs focusing on each color on the color wheel. I will be the first to admit that some of my ideas fell short, but such as it is when you have to come up with six different ideas for one assignment, at least half of my ideas were pretty decent. The biggest challenge is that we were not allowed to take a photograph of something that was the color we were working with just for color's sake, we really had to bring the right feelings to a photograph with the color in it.



Green was one I had a hard time with as you can see. Green is supposed to be soothing, refreshing, and evoke feelings of peace, harmony, ecology and nature. I really couldn't come up with anything interesting, so I just went to a place that I knew was really green and tried to take some interesting photos. It works for the feelings I was trying to go with, but it's pretty literal as well, so I'm sure my professor wasn't too thrilled with these ones.



While I was working on this assignment, we were at my mom's house visiting her after her surgery, so I thought I would get my blue done. Blue is supposed to be peaceful, confident, cool, trustworthy, and remind us of the sky and ocean. I knew I couldn't just take a photo of the ocean itself, so I took some interesting photos of the jetty that separates Long Beach from Seal Beach. While out shooting for this one, it was quite an adventure too as I ended up slipping on the jetty while my camera was over my shoulder (and a lens in my pocket). Luckily I fell to the other side to protect my camera, but bruised my hip and shoulder pretty badly. My dad teased me about worrying more about my equipment than myself, I just told him that at least I have insurance for my body, not my equipment. After all that, I was pretty pleased with my photos, only to have my professor say that the ocean and sky weren't blue enough (and joked about how I should have gone to Hawaii--uh, yeah, he's hilarious). I guess that's what you get in So Cal when all the beaches are dirty and you have to wait for the marine layer to burn off in the morning before you get a blue sky. Maybe I should have just slept in.



I had trouble coming up with ideas for purple as well, but I found this great textured blanket at the store on clearance for real cheap, so I thought about having Lindsay dress up as a queen. Purple is calming, royal, eccentric, spiritual, wealth, and well liked, so obviously I was going for royal here. I thought it was kind of a cute idea until my professor took a look and told me it was too literal. Oh well. Lindsay had fun posing for me here (for the first few minutes anyway).





Now getting to some of my better ideas, I saw this bright orange shirt and sunglasses and knew I had to buy them for Lindsay to pose for me in since she's such a cutie (not that the other two aren't, but she's more likely to pose for me than they will). So orange is warm, energy, flamboyant, happiness, stimulating, and attention-getting. I was going for flamboyant here with her sitting in a chair in the swimming pool in February, but after taking a look at the photos, I realized they didn't work as well as I wanted to because February in Arizona looks like summer in other places so you don't have any indication that it's not a nice summer day here. For the record, the pool is absolutely freezing in these photos and I know that for a fact because I had to get down into the pool in order to the the perspective I needed for these photos. So, good idea, but it fell flat a little.



Yellow I came up with the idea for pretty quickly, but struggled a little with where I was going to do the photos and who I was going to ask to pose for me. I ended up asking my friend Tricia to model for me (who you might remember from last semester's photos as well). She's so beautiful it makes it easy to take nice photos, and we had a fun time out there making each other laugh so it was fun (for me anyway). Yellow is positive, optimistic, happy, energetic, sun, and it fatigues the eye. I wanted to go for something happy and sunny, so we ended up with some yellow flowers and my friend. I'll have to post more of her photos in another post because so many of them turned out nice, but I haven't had the chance to edit them yet. This one is my favorite though.




Finally is red, and this is the one I did the print of and turned in. This was the one I came up with the idea for almost instantly and I knew I wanted to light it with mostly candles, so there's very little light in these photos (which, unfortunately blew out the back of the photo where the candles were in the frame). I wanted to go back and shoot this again to get the candles out of the background, but I messed up the lighting the second time by trying to add too much light which really changed the way the photo felt. I thought that I'd be able to replicate what I had done before since I had done it once and learned that it's almost impossible to take the same photograph over again even if you control as many of the variables as you can. In any case, red is intense, love, attention-getting, confident, hot, and a stimulant. I thought this photo fit the bill on all of these counts and added a few elements that made it just a little different than a standard love photo.

So now that we've learned more about color, hopefully I can really start paying attention to color in my photos and make them better by making better choices about what color to use in different places. As challenging as this assignment was, I was really happy that we focused on this.

A special day

Eleven years ago today, I woke up in all kinds of pain. And even though it was my hardest and longest labor, my little boy has brought so much joy to our lives every day since then. Happy birthday Cole buddy, I hope you have a great day. I have so many hopes for you this eleventh year, that you will be able to control some of the forces that are bringing you down and that you'll be able to learn how to shine in school again. Mostly, I just hope that you are able to be happy and be more of the sunshine that you have always been in my life. I love you more than words can say.

Mom update

I haven't posted in awhile because things have just been too chaotic around here for me to keep up. I've been out to So Cal twice in the last four weeks to visit with and help take care of my mom as she recovered from the surgery to remove the tumor in her colon. She recovered really well from it and has been in really good spirits, so that's been really nice for us. After biopsying all of her lymph nodes around her colon, however, the doctor updated her diagnosis to stage three because of the amount of lymph nodes affected. This means that she will need to have chemo for longer than we originally anticipated. And while she was hoping to return to school shortly, she has had to make the hard decision to be off for the rest of the school year and having the principal tell her class about her condition. I know that she cares very deeply for her students, so this was a really hard thing for her to do, but I hope that it allows her to concentrate on her own health and recovery. This weekend I took the kids out to see her before she began chemo and she decided to go ahead and shave her head now (she has been reading that it is much less traumatic to shave it versus waiting until it falls out), so she had fun allowing her grandkids to do it for her, and of course, with the two of us being scrapbookers, we documented the whole event. All in all, I would say that as we gear up for this next chapter in her healing, my mom is doing very well and is in really high spirits. She knows that all the prayers on her behalf have really been helping and she is grateful to everyone for thinking about her.

Practicing avoidance

I'm really good at avoidance. It is very easy to assume the position of an ostrich with my head in the sand when life gets hard. It's especially easy when the problems are occurring for family members who don't live nearby; since we don't have to see them often, it gets placed in the back of my mind and pushed to the way side. But there always comes a point where you can no longer avoid reality and it all comes crashing down. That moment began for me last night. At the beginning of December, my mom was diagnosed with colon cancer. She is scheduled for surgery this Friday to remove the tumor and remove the lymph nodes for biopsy which will determine how aggressively they have to treat her after the surgery. Schedules being what they are, I pretty much only talk to my mom once a week, and other than the days that she's had that have been really bad, it's been pretty easy to avoid thinking about the implications and get on with my every day life. And now, of course, with the surgery so close, it's become too difficult to avoid and I'm discovering all these emotions that I had buried.

My mom and I didn't always get along. Like most teenagers, I really detested my parents. At the time, I was angry at them for not being perfect. That all changes when you have children and you struggle to do your best. It definitely gave me perspective on all that my parents were able to accomplish with the five children they had. My mom was responsible for a lot of the good things about me: my intelligence, my foundation in my beliefs, my compassion and drive to be a good mother among other things. Of course she also passed on the scrapbooking gene, so I definitely have to be grateful for that. I know from talking with her that this journey she is on has really shown her how much she is loved. I may not be as eloquent as I would like to express how I feel about my mom, so I will just keep it simple. I hope that she knows that I love her with all my heart.

And now a request. I would ask that you keep my mom in your prayers this week. We may not all believe the same things or practice the same religion, but I believe that our Father in Heaven doesn't care how you come to Him, as long as you do. My family is going to be fasting and praying for her on Friday for her surgery to come out well and for her to recover quickly both from the surgery and cancer. If you feel so inclined, please join us. I know that through faith all things are possible and I have the greatest faith in my Father in Heaven that my mom will be cared for and will be restored to full health.